At the urging of the home office in New Haven as well as other missionaries in China, the Yale Mission early on assumed more of an educational than evangelical function.

Between 1919 and 1920, future Chairman Mao Zedong had several encounters with the school: he edited its student magazine, re-focusing it on "thought reorientation," and operated a bookshop out of its medical college.

Within four years, however, a Communist insurgency toppled the Nationalist government and Yale-in-China's future seemed uncertain in the face of growing hostility between the United States and China.

Dr. Dwight Rugh, Yale-in-China's last representative in Changsha, spent most of 1950 under house arrest as the only American on campus, and was eventually expelled from China in May 1951.

Preston Schoyer, who had been a Bachelor in Changsha before the war, worked both formally and informally to develop new programs and maintain ties with old friends.

In 1956, Yale-in-China resumed the practice of sending Bachelors, two recent Yale graduates, to teach English, though now to New Asia College instead of the Yali School.

[5] Yale-in-China contributed to the new campus by securing funds to construct buildings, including the university health clinic, the Yali Guest House, Friendship Lodge and a student dormitory at New Asia College.

Meanwhile, the relationship with New Asia College, where the Yale–China Association (as the organization was renamed in 1975) has maintained a representative office for fifty years, remains a strong one.

By the 1970s, both New Asia College and the Chinese University of Hong Kong had achieved a level of institutional maturity and financial stability that decreased the need for Yale-China's contributions.

Rather than seeking to resume the joint administration of the former Yale-in-China institutions, the emphasis was placed on shorter-term academic exchanges in the fields of medicine and American Studies and a resumption of the English language instruction program.